Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  I remembered this episode as I was going to the bathroom on the ground floor, where I picked up a box of cotton balls and a bottle of alcohol and then returned to the top of the first flight of stairs to clean up that inexplicable stain that was not my responsibility, it was lucky it was on the wooden floor and not on the carpet. When he gave his rapid, flustered account in the shop, Comendador had not mentioned to Cuesta anything about the bloodstains that had clearly come from his girlfriend, about those on the floor and those on the sheets and the spots on her T-shirt, and she herself had not apparently mentioned them over the phone, after all, what was the point — it might, indeed, have seemed indiscreet, tactless. The girl might have felt embarrassed and preferred to pretend that they had never existed and that no one could, therefore, have seen them: perhaps — without actually saying so — she was asking his forgiveness for that. And so Comendador never knew for certain where they came from or what had caused them, but decided to content himself with the explanation of an unexpected period or one which, out of perfectly understandable carelessness, had not been intercepted in time, and, after a few days had passed, he even began to doubt he had seen them at all, those bloodstains, that’s what happens sometimes with those things that we deny or keep silent about, that we hide away and bury, they inevitably start to fade and blur, and we come to believe that they never actually existed or happened, we tend to be incredibly distrustful of our own perceptions once they have passed and find no outside confirmation or ratification, we sometimes renounce our memory and end up telling ourselves inexact versions of what we witnessed, we do not trust ourselves as witnesses, indeed, we do not trust ourselves at all, we submit everything to a process of translation, we translate our own crystal-clear actions and those translations are not always faithful, thus our actions begin to grow unclear, and ultimately we surrender and give ourselves over to a process of perpetual interpretation, applied even to those things we know to be absolute fact, so that everything drifts, unstable, imprecise, and nothing is ever fixed or definite and everything oscillates before us until the end of time, perhaps it’s because we cannot really stand certainty, not even certainties that suit us and comfort us, and certainly not those that displease or unsettle or hurt us, no one wants to be transformed into that, into their own fever and spear and pain. ‘Perhaps I was frightened by the cut on the girl’s forehead, I mean, she hit her head with such a thud, and, who knows, seeing a little blood appear possibly made me think that a dark stain on the wooden floorboards was also blood, it was pretty hard to see in that corridor,’ Comendador had said to me when he told me about the incident some days later. ‘And what about the stains on the sheets, the drops of blood?’ I said. ‘Oh, I don’t know, they could have been something else, wine perhaps, or even brandy, she had probably been swigging it straight from the bottle in the corridor and in bed and then, when she felt ill, had spilled it and not even noticed, I mean, she was completely out of it, either that or feeling in a really bad way by the time she did finally manage to drag herself out of bed and come and open the door to me.’ ‘Are you telling me that while you’re absolutely sure that you saw drops of blood in several places, at the same time you also think it’s perfectly possible that you didn’t see them or that they might not even have been there, that it was just a product of your imagination or your fear?’ ‘Yes, I suppose I am, I suppose that’s possible,’ replied Comendador, perplexed.

  I was now cleaning up the stain in Wheeler’s house with some cotton balls soaked in alcohol, the blood was not very fresh, but neither had it completely dried or hardened, and the varnished, waxed and polished wood made it fairly easy to remove or eliminate it, although not without some effort and by dint of rubbing repeatedly and using up more alcohol and cotton balls than I had expected, I placed them — the bloodstained ones — in Peter’s ashtray, all the while taking care not to damage the floorboards or to replace one stain with another, you can never be too careful with alcohol. What is hardest to get rid of with bloodstains is the rim, the circle, the circumference, I don’t know why that should stick to the floor so much more obstinately than the rest, or to the porcelain of the sink or the bath, where drops or stains tend to fall, in fact, it happens immediately, even when the blood is fresh, as soon as it’s spilled, there’s doubtless some physical law that explains it, although I don’t know what it is. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘perhaps it’s a way of clinging on to the present, a reluctance to disappear that exists in objects and in the inanimate generally, and not just in people, perhaps it’s an attempt by all things to leave their mark, to make it harder for them to be denied or glossed over or forgotten, it’s their way of saying “I was here”, or “I’m still here, therefore I must have been before”, and to prevent others from saying “No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened.” And now, while I continue with my cleaning, and the stubborn ring of blood starts to give and to fade, I wonder if, once it has gone completely and not a trace of it is left, I will begin to doubt I saw it, as Comendador did with his bloodstains, and to doubt that I was here on my knees like an old-fashioned cleaning-lady, although without the foam-rubber cushion they used to kneel on so as not to bruise their knees on the hard floor, it was bad enough that the poor women had to show us the backs of their thighs, by “us” I mean us children, the boys at least. And when there is not the slightest trace left, perhaps then I will start to think that this stain was just a figment of my imagination, caused by lack of sleep and too much reading and too much drink and too many contrary voices and by the indifferent, languid murmur of the river. And by Wheeler’s sinuous conversation.’ And for a few seconds I felt a desire — or perhaps it was only superstition — not to remove it entirely and for ever, but to leave a remnant that I could see again the following morning, a morning which, according to the clocks, had already begun, just a fragment of the circumference, a minimal curve that would remind me ‘I’m still here, therefore I must have been here before: you saw me then and you can see me now.’ Instead, I finished my task and the wood was left spotless, no one would ever know about the blood if I said nothing and asked neither Wheeler nor Mrs Berry about it. And I went back down the stairs, but did not throw the red or brown or used bits of cotton into the kitchen bin, instead I went to the bathroom to restore to their places the packet and the bottle and there I lifted the lid of the toilet and emptied the ashtray into it, then immediately pulled the chain — we still keep the expression, even though there are no chains and we no longer pull them — and thus did away with the last material proof.

  ‘You’re always such a lucky bastard,’ I said to Comendador. ‘You leave the poor girl lying there with her head cracked open and bleeding, you abandon her, believing her to be dead or not even wanting to know whether she is or not, and she ends up apologising to you for giving you such a fright and thanking you for having gone off without helping her. If the same thing had happened to me, and I had behaved the way you did, the girl would have died and it would have turned out later on that she could have been saved if only I hadn’t wasted so much time. And then I’d have had her on my conscience for ever after.’ Comendador looked at me with a mixture of superiority and resigned envy, I knew that look well, I’ve known it since childhood and have seen it subsequently in many other people throughout my life, although not directed at me: it is the look of someone who would prefer not to be the way he is — probably more for aesthetic, or perhaps narrative, reasons than moral ones — and at the same time knows that he has everything going for him and will always land on his feet by being precisely the way he is, unlike those he envies. ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t have done the same, Jaime, you wouldn’t have behaved like that,’ he replied. ‘You would have stayed until you’d managed to bring her round somehow, and if you couldn’t, then you would have immediately called a doctor or an ambulance, even though you still had the drugs in your pocket and even though there might have been God knows what else in th
e apartment or in the girl’s body. Despite all the dangers. And if she had died, then it would have been because she was going to die anyway, and not because you ran away or didn’t do what you should have done. I, as you know, have the luck of the coward, which is always far greater than the luck of the brave or the intrepid, despite what every story and every legend in the world may say. Nothing happened, and the girl doesn’t bear me any ill will, nor does Cuesta. He doesn’t even feel the tiniest bit suspicious or disappointed, which would have been a touch awkward just now. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’ve found out precisely what I’m like. I mean I knew already, but now I’ve actually experienced it, in the flesh, so to speak, and although both the girl and Cuesta will soon have forgotten the whole episode, I’ll never forget it, because, the way I see it, a girl died right in front of my eyes and lay there for several minutes, and I simply took off with my load of drugs safely stowed away and did absolutely nothing to help her.’ ‘Well, you did go and warn Cuesta, you did run all that way, you at least made sure that other people knew about it and could do something,’ I said. Comendador was not one to deceive himself, or not much (he might do so more now that he has found respectability in New York or Miami or wherever). ‘Yes, it could have been much worse, granted, but you and I know that what I did was nothing, and that it wasn’t what I should have done. So although the girl is fine and nothing bad happened to her because of me and my selfishness, I still have it on my conscience.’ Then he added with a half-smile, as if contradicting himself (the half-smile from school that he used on classmates and teachers alike, and which always got him out of the worst scrapes and the worst punishment, which always sowed a seed of doubt and contradicted both what he had said the moment before and what he was swearing to be the truth as he drew back his lips and unleashed that smile on us): ‘Luckily, my conscience is tough enough to take it.’ He did have a lot of luck, it was true, whether it was coward’s luck or not. Even the slow drop of blood that trickled from his nose when in the presence of a highly deductive border guard in Palermo could, in the end, be seen as good luck. He had spent time behind some particularly sharp bars, but thanks to those cutting edges he had given up his life of small-time crime and ignominious dangers and was, when last I heard, a wealthy businessman, although I was rarely in touch with him, which, to be honest, is the way I preferred it, now that our contacts had grown cooler, less frequent, or perhaps had ended altogether: there are siblings and cousins, there are childhood friends with whom, as adults, one doesn’t know what to do. Perhaps I am such a person for someone else or for some old flame. I was not persuaded, though, that I would have behaved any differently if placed in Comendador’s position. I couldn’t prove it, though, not having experienced it in the flesh, as they say. Who knows? No one knows until it happens to them, and not even then. The same person might react in different or contradictory ways depending on the day and the degree of fear and on mood, depending on what is at stake or on the importance he gives to his image or history at each stage of his life, depending on whether he is going to tell someone or keep silent about his behaviour afterwards, be it noble or petty, base or elevated. Or depending on how he hopes it will be seen subsequently, on how it will be told or recounted by others should he die and not be able to. No one knows about the next time, even if there has been a first, what happened before imposes no obligations, nor does it condemn us to a series of repetitions, and someone who was generous and brave yesterday may turn out to be treacherous and craven tomorrow, someone who, long ago, was a coward and a traitor may today be loyal and decent, and perhaps the future has more influence and imposes more obligations on us than the past, the unknown more than the already known, the as-yet-untried more than the tried and rejected, the still-to-come more than what has already happened, the possible more than what has already been. And yet. Not that anything that happened is ever completely erased, not even the bloodstain and that stubborn ring rubbed and scrubbed away, in time an analyst would have doubtless found some microscopic trace on the wood, and in the depths of our memory too — those rarely visited depths — there is an analyst waiting with his magnifying glass or his microscope (which is why oblivion is always blind in one eye). Or even worse, sometimes that analyst exists in other people’s memories to which we have no access (‘Will he remember, will he realise?’ we wonder uneasily. ‘Will it still rankle with him or will he have forgotten? Will he recollect meeting me before or will he treat me as a complete stranger? Will he know about it? Will his father have told him, or his mother, will he recognise me, will they have told anyone else? Or will he have no idea who I am, what I am, and know nothing at all? [“Keep quiet, say nothing, not even to save yourself. Keep quiet, and save yourself.”] I’ll know by the way he looks at me, but perhaps I won’t, because he might want to deceive me with that look.’). There is much that both does and does not belong to me, in my own memory, to go no further. Who knew, who knows, no one knows. And probably Nin himself did not know that he would resist to the grave, when his political neighbours tortured him in the language he had learned and which he had served so well. There, right there, near my own city, Madrid, where I no longer live. There, in a cellar or in a barracks or a prison, in a hotel or a house in Alcalá de Henares. There, in the Russian colony, in the town where Cervantes was born.

  And there was Nin in Fleming’s novel, quite near the beginning, it didn’t take me long to find him, Wheeler had marked the paragraph as he had in the Doble Diario and in other books, a meticulous, attentive and, at the same time, impulsive reader, he wrote mocking interjections in the margins, or scornful notes to the author (he never let a piece of false reasoning pass, or a lie or ignorance or sheer stupidity, issuing terse, emphatic judgements such as ‘Silly’ or ‘Foolish’), or, now and then, enthusiastic ones, as well as comments intended merely as reminders to himself, and exclamation marks or question marks when he did not believe something or thought it unintelligible, and occasionally he had scribbled ‘Bad’ (deceitful and incompetent writers, Tello-Trapp or whoever, had incurred quite a few of those), indicating with an arrow the statement condemned by his shrewd mind and his exacting mineral eyes, or ‘Excellent’ when a phrase seemed right to him or moved him, ‘Quite moving’, I read once, in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia I think. ‘Quite right’, he sometimes wrote approvingly, in Benet’s book for example, and ‘Quite true’ occurred often in Thomas, whom he must have known in person since the latter taught at a university very near Oxford, Reading, a place famous for its old prison and for the ballad written there by prisoner C.3.3., not another alias exactly.

  The paragraph came towards the end of Chapter 7, entitled ‘The Wizard of Ice’, which, in Spanish, would be an untranslatable pun on The Wizard of Oz. ‘Of course’, I read in that paragraph:

  Rosa Klebb had a strong will to survive, or she would not have become one of the most powerful women in the State, and certainly the most feared. Her rise, Kronsteen remembered, had begun with the Spanish Civil War. Then, as a double agent inside POUM — that is, working for the OGPU in Moscow as well as for Communist Intelligence in Spain — she had been the right hand, and some sort of a mistress, they said, of her chief, the famous Andreas Nin. She had worked with him from 1935–37. Then, on the orders of Moscow, he was murdered and, it was rumoured, murdered by her. Whether this was true or not, from then on she had progressed slowly but straight up the ladder of power, surviving setbacks, surviving wars, surviving, because she forged no allegiances and joined no factions, all the purges, until, in 1953, with the death of Beria, the bloodstained hands grasped the rung, so few from the very top, that was Head of the Operations Department of SMERSH.

  While I was at it, I decided I might as well type it out. I had seen OGPU mentioned in other books, and knew that it was the same as the NKVD or, indeed, as the later KGB, that is, the Soviet Secret Service. Beria was, of course, the notorious Lavrenti Beria, Commissar of Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police for many years, and, up u
ntil Stalin’s death, Stalin’s most astute and ruthless instrument in the organisation of plots, liquidations, purges, settlings of scores, forced recruitment, repression, blackmail, smear and terror campaigns, interrogations, torture and, needless to say, espionage. As for SMERSH, an acronym I did not know, Fleming explained in an author’s note signed by him, that:

  SMERSH — a contraction of Smiert Spionam — Death to Spies — exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct. Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them — at No. 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow …

  I had a quick look at Chapter 4, which, under the title ‘The Moguls of Death’, opened with the same or similar facts:

  SMERSH is the official murder organization of the Soviet government. It operates both at home and abroad and, in 1955, it employed a total of 40,000 men and women. SMERSH is a contraction of ‘Smiert Spionam’, which means ‘Death to Spies’. It is a name used only among its staff and among Soviet officials. No sane member of the public would dream of allowing the word to pass his lips.

  When pedestrians walked past No. 13 of the wide, dull street in question, the narrator went on, they would keep their eyes on the ground and the hairs would prick on the back of their neck or, if they remembered in time and could do so inconspicuously, they would cross the street before they reached the ominous, inelegant, ugly building. But who knows, and I had no idea where to look in order to check if SMERSH really had or hadn’t existed or if the whole thing — starting with that author’s note — was a novelist’s trick to support and confirm a false truth.